Shashi Tharoor, wrote an
article favorable to Sathya Sai Baba in the International Herald Tribune of December
3, 2002.

In fact, Tharoor's article is quite insidious. The
point is not whether the Sai devotee of the piece is Tharoor's mother. Her son may indeed
be the acolyte, but his enthusiasm for the mystic, emblematic collocation of the Ancient
India (Sai Baba, the holy man) and the modern (Infosys, the high-tech corporation) has
infectious capabilities.

In what follows, I quote Tharoor's words, and, by
way of slightly oblique commentary on them, imagine myself as a trusting reader of his IHT
article. I muse away in a manner that will prime me for cancelling the rest of my life and
dragging my family off to India to see the so-called Godman.

A private audience with the ocher-robed guru was
astonishing at several levels. Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that
he could not possibly have known.

How wonderful. I am astonished, too. This Mr Baba is
clearly a man of God or His Prophet or some
such. He is just what our family needs. We can
cancel our intended camping holiday in the woods and go off to India. Mind you, I hear
that people on the Internet are saying nasty things about him - but hey man look at the
horrible things people said about Jesus! If it is God's will, this Sai Baba will notice
us, or in some way get us on the right track. I just know it; I FEEL it!

Most startling, he materializes gifts from thin air - in
my case a gold ring with nine embedded stones. He slipped it on my finger, remarking,
"See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your
finger."

Just like the loaves and fishes manifested
out of nothing. My God, the miracles of Jesus are being repeated even in our own time, in
an Age of Disbelief! The fact that the ring fitted Mr Tharoor's
finger shows that Sathya Sai Baba - or God through him - is all-knowing of our slightest
dimensions! He has counted even the number of hairs of our head, and knows the sizes of
our fingers! Wow! But it's not a gold ring I want - just a divine golden smile from him. I
FEEL somehow that he will do it. Of course, Mildred and the girls will like something in
the jewellery line, and want to show it to all the women at the Church when we get back.

But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong
to see Sai Baba as a conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers
into constructive directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.

See, not taking a thing for himself. I hope he takes those impressionable young
sons of mine and gets their energies going in some constructive directions. Hey, maybe
Mildred and I can enrol them at his one of his colleges and his university. He will put
them into ship shape. If Sathya Sai Baba can inspire so many of his followers, including
no doubt hardened journalists like Mr Tharoor, then he can do
it for my family and me! And gosh, we must see if we can get some of our friends to come
along to with us too, and their children. Yes, they are looking for a boarding school for
their children. Perfect. And we'll make sure Mr Baba gets a BIG donation from us all -
we'll cancel World Vision and the Salvation Army. I shall send all our friends copies of
Mr Tharoor's article. In fact, I think I'll email it to all my Rotarian friends. It feels
kind of like I am distributing a modern day Scripture. God, it feels good!

The next day I drove from Bangalore in a different
direction, to the campus of Infosys, India's leading computer technology company. It, too,
wore the clean and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no temples
here, no pavilions thronged with devotees ... I marveled at the sophistication and
affluence visible in every square inch of the campus.

Clean and scrubbed - now we could do with a bit of that
in our town. What a pride these people who live in Puttaparthi must take in their
wonderful town, just like the pride shown in the magnificent Infosys campus.

Sai Baba and Infosys are both facets of 21st century
India. One produces rings out of the ether and urges people to be better human beings; the
other deals in a different form of virtual reality and helps human beings to better
themselves. One runs free hospitals and schools; the other seeks to bring the benefits of
technology to a country still mired in millennial poverty.

That's it - Mr Tharoor speaks like a visionary.
With inspiration, he has seen that Sathya Sai Baba, the embodiment of the Timeless and the
Ancientmost, is at one with the spirit and gift of Time and Progress. To pilgrimages on
aeroplanes. Temples and spinning wheels; silicon and infrastructure. As Mr Tharoor so
brilliantly says,

Sai Baba and Infosys are emblematic of an India that
somehow manages to live in several centuries at once.

No doubt of it - Sathya Sai Baba and Infosys are the
answer to India's problems of being so unclean and unscrubbed, and millenially poor (well,
after the British came, anyway). That's what we need. Cleanliness and scrubbedness are
next to Godliness. And now with Mr Bill Gates (with his heart bursting with lovingkindness
like the heart of a Princess Di and a Mother Teresa) so generously putting hundreds of
millions of dollars into raising up India, it should not be very long before Mr Baba and
Mr Gates get together and clean up real good!

Look how clean and scrubbed our wonderful young men and
women who work for Infosys and Microsoft, and IBM and Wipro. And look at that wonderful
picture I saw of Sathya Sai Baba in the New York Times - so very clean and very scrubbed.

BANGALORE, India. I made separate trips from Bangalore
recently that revealed, within a span of 48 hours, two different but related facets of
India. Late one night I set out on a four-hour drive with my mother to the well-lit and
orderly town of Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh.

Buildings gleamed white against the
streetlights; the sidewalks, patrolled by volunteers even at that hour, seemed freshly
scrubbed. Puttaparthi, once a humble village like so many others, had become a boomtown as
the birthplace and headquarters of the spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba.

A private audience with the ocher-robed guru was
astonishing at several levels. Sai Baba uttered insights about my family and myself that
he could not possibly have known.

He has a habit, disconcerting at first, of turning his
palm quizzically outward and staring off into the distance, as if silently interrogating
an unseen, all-knowing source.

Sometimes he scribbles in the air with a finger as if
dashing off a note to a celestial messenger.

Then he says things which are by turns banal or
profound, and sometimes both (if only because so much of what he says has become worn out
by repetition and frequent quotation, including in signs on the streets outside). Most
startling, he materializes gifts from thin air - in my case a gold ring with nine embedded
stones. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, "See how well it fits. Even a
goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger."

My mother, a longtime devotee, received a little silver
urn overflowing with vibhuti, or sacred ash.

"It was as if he had heard what I wanted,"
she said. But a skilled magician can do that, and it would be wrong to see Sai Baba as a
conjurer. He has channeled the hopes and energies of his followers into constructive
directions, both spiritual and philanthropic.

Everything at his complex is staffed by volunteers who
rotate through Puttaparthi at well-organized two-week intervals. Many left distinguished
positions behind. The free hospital in Puttaparthi is one of the best in India; many
leading doctors volunteer their services. Sai Baba has built schools and colleges, and is
now involved in a project to bring irrigation to a number of parched southern districts.

The next day I drove from Bangalore in a different
direction, to the campus of Infosys, India's leading computer technology company. It, too,
wore the clean and scrubbed look I had seen at Puttaparthi. But there were no temples
here, no pavilions thronged with devotees.

Instead, escorted by the affable chief executive,
Nandan Nilekani, I saw the world's leading software museum, a state-of-the-art
teleconference center, classrooms with sophisticated video equipment and a work
environment that could not be bettered in any developed country. Infosys is a world leader
in information technology. It provides services in consulting, systems integration and
applications to some of the biggest companies in the world. Its 13,000 staff members,
known in the company's argot as "Infoscions," work in more than 30 offices
around the world. In Bangalore, they sit amidst lush, landscaped greenery dotted with
pools, recharge themselves at an ultramodern gym, display their creativity at a company
art gallery and enjoy a choice of nine food courts for their lunchtime snacks.

I marveled at the sophistication and affluence visible
in every square inch of the campus.

"We wanted to prove," Nandan explained,
"that this could be done in India."

Sai Baba and Infosys are both facets of 21st century
India. One produces rings out of the ether and urges people to be better human beings; the
other deals in a different form of virtual reality and helps human beings to better
themselves. One runs free hospitals and schools; the other seeks to bring the benefits of
technology to a country still mired in millennial poverty.

In the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared
dams and factories to be "the new temples of modern India." What he failed to
recognize was that the old temples continued to maintain their hold on the Indian
imagination.

The software programs of the information technology
companies dotting Bangalore's "Silicon Plateau" may be the new mantras of India,
but they supplement, rather than supplant, the old mantras. Sai Baba and Infosys are
emblematic of an India that somehow manages to live in several centuries at once.

On our way out of Puttaparthi my mother and I talked to
a devotee who was lining up to buy a packet of vibhuti to take home with him.

"What do you do?" I asked. ."I am,"
he replied proudly, a cell phone glinting in his shirt pocket, "a project manager at
Infosys."

The writer is the author, most recently, of the novel
"Riot." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.